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- All Subjects: Information Technology
- Language: English
- Member of: Theses and Dissertations
- Status: Published
Description
Software systems can exacerbate and cause contemporary social inequities. As such, scholars and activists have scrutinized sociotechnical systems like those used in facial recognition technology or predictive policing using the frameworks of algorithmic bias and dataset bias. However, these conversations are incomplete without study of data models: the structural, epistemological, and technical frameworks that shape data. In Modeling Power: Data Models and the Production of Social Inequality, I elucidate the connections between relational data modeling techniques and manifestations of systems of power in the United States, specifically white supremacy and cisgender normativity. This project has three distinct parts. First, I historicize early publications by E. F. Codd, Peter Chen, Miles Smith & Diane Smith, and J. R. Abrial to demonstrate that now-taken-for-granted data modeling techniques were products of their social and technical moments and, as such, reinforced dominant systems of power. I further connect database reification techniques to contemporary racial analyses of reification via the work of Cheryl Harris. Second, I reverse engineer Android applications (with Jadx and apktool) to uncover the relational data models within. I analyze DAO annotations, create entity-relationship diagrams, and then examine those resultant models, again linking them back to systems of race and gender power. I craft a method for performing a reverse engineering investigation within a specific sociotechnical context -- a situated analysis of the contextual epistemological frames embedded within relational paradigms. Finally, I develop a relational data model that integrates insights from the project’s reverse and historical engineering phases. In my speculative engineering process, I suggest that the temporality of modern digital computing is incommensurate with the temporality of modern transgender lives. Following this, I speculate and build a trans-inclusive data model that demonstrates uses of reification to actively subvert systems of racialized and gendered power. By promoting aspects of social identity to first-order objects within a data model, I show that additional “intellectual manageability” is possible through reification. Through each part, I argue that contemporary approaches to the social impacts of software systems incomplete without data models. Data models structure algorithmic opportunities. As algorithms continue to reinforce systems of inequality, data models provide opportunities for intervention and subversion.
ContributorsStevens, Nikki Lane (Author) / Wernimont, Jacqueline D (Thesis advisor) / Michael, Katina (Thesis advisor) / Richter, Jennifer (Committee member) / Duarte, Marisa E. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
Description
There is a lack of prior research about factors and conditions relating to the underdevelopment of infrastructure on Navajo Nation, especially from a community-centered perspective. As a Diné researcher, the intersection created via the fields of Science and Technology Studies (STS), American Indian Studies (AIS), and Diné Studies creates a means by which developmental policy and futures planning can be discussed. Through qualitative inquiry, specifically cross-case analysis, oral histories, and archival review from a Diné perspective, this work establishes the relationship between roads, energy, and Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in the Navajo Nation in relation to the historical underdevelopment of infrastructure on the reservation, especially from 2000 to 2020. Roads and energy infrastructures make way for ICT deployments, and together, these three infrastructures shape futures planning for the Nation, including governance decisions relating to partnerships, and internal versus external development. Relationships between infrastructural efforts, past colonial practices of the United States (U.S.), and relations between the U.S. and tribes during this era shape the development of relevant expertise within Navajo Nation entities and also impact access to and uses of significant funding opportunities available via the early 21st century American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. A Diné-centered concept of care through long-term infrastructure deployment relates tribal sovereignty and Indigenous ways of knowing to Indigenous Science and Technology Studies (STS) and suggests new directions for applied Diné studies in the field of Indigenous STS.
ContributorsGeorge, Alaina Sarah (Author) / Duarte, Marisa E (Thesis advisor) / Richter, Jennifer (Thesis advisor) / Wetmore, Jameson (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023